The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

Thursday, 10 December 2015

Durham Records Online additions

Tanfield's "lost register” 1577-1719Researchers are often disappointed to learn that the earliest parish register of Tanfield St. Margaret, up to 1719, has been lost or destroyed. Fortunately, some extracts of the first register were recorded in a manuscript compiled by Sir Cuthbert Sharp (1781-1849), a distinguished antiquarian and friend of Robert Surtees, with whom he collaborated on that mammoth work on Durham's history, "The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham". Prominent Durham families and their pedigrees were included in that book, which may explain why Sharp collected noteworthy extracts from a number of selected parish registers. This small book, titled "Manuscript Library of Sir C. Sharp", is one of a collection known as Sharp MS22, held in Durham Cathedral's Library. On page 54 of the manuscript, under the heading of Tanfield, appears this statement: "The early register in a most lamentable condition has been drowned”.

One of our team recently transcribed the 271 extracts from Sharp's manuscript, consisting of 146 baptisms, 31 marriages and 94 burials between the years 1577 and 1719. The second register, which we have had online for years, begins in 1720.